Abstract
Designers are increasingly called upon to address complex systemic crises, yet these expanding ambitions for impact risk overburdening both practitioners and students. This paper draws attention to the mounting pedagogical pressures within design education as students navigate problem-based, project-based, inquiry-based and transformative learning frameworks. I argue that as systemic aspirations for impact are integrated into curricula, the emotional and cognitive demands on learners intensify, threatening discovery, joy, and sustained engagement. Drawing upon care-based pedagogy and educational scaffolding, I propose approaches to support emerging designers learning to work amidst uncertainty, vulnerability and urgency. Positioned in contrast to design-for-transition literature that emphasises what and how we design, this paper focuses on who is designing and with what psychological resources. Without care-based scaffolding that endures, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to address through design education itself.
Keywords
design education, resilience, well-being, care
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1839
Citation
Price, R. (2026) Pedagogies under Pressure in a Design-for-Transitions Era, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1839
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Pedagogies under Pressure in a Design-for-Transitions Era
Designers are increasingly called upon to address complex systemic crises, yet these expanding ambitions for impact risk overburdening both practitioners and students. This paper draws attention to the mounting pedagogical pressures within design education as students navigate problem-based, project-based, inquiry-based and transformative learning frameworks. I argue that as systemic aspirations for impact are integrated into curricula, the emotional and cognitive demands on learners intensify, threatening discovery, joy, and sustained engagement. Drawing upon care-based pedagogy and educational scaffolding, I propose approaches to support emerging designers learning to work amidst uncertainty, vulnerability and urgency. Positioned in contrast to design-for-transition literature that emphasises what and how we design, this paper focuses on who is designing and with what psychological resources. Without care-based scaffolding that endures, we risk reproducing the very crises we seek to address through design education itself.